News

Due to several requests the final presentation date was postponed to: 13.08.2014, 9:50-11:30. It will take place in room E202. The meeting on July 30th remains valid and will be used for feedback.

We have set up a mailing list for the course. If you did not get a welcome e-mail from the list, please sign up here. You can use the list for all general questions or to find a team if you do not have one.

Meetings and Slides

Initial Meeting	23.04., 9:50-11:30, A313	Introduction & Organization	slides console demo source code
Phase 1	30.04., 9:50-11:30, A313	Game concept, initial implementation	slides
Phase 2	14.05., 9:50-11:30, A313	Interest Management	slides
Phase 3	28.05., 9:50-11:30, A313	Communication protocol	slides
Phase 4	11.06., 9:50-11:30, A313	Half time	slides
Phase 5	25.06., 9:50-11:30, A313	PlanetLab	slides
Phase 6	09.07., 9:50-11:30, A313
Phase 7	30.07., 9:50-11:30, A313
Final Presentation	13.08., 9:50-11:30, E202
Delivery of Report and Source Code	31.08., 23:59

Registration

Please register via TUCaN or write us an email.

Topic

In this year's lab course, we explore peer-to-peer mechanisms for state management in multiplayer online games. The virtual worlds of such games typically contain lots of objects, each having its own (modifiable) state. With the peer-to-peer approach, the game state is not managed centrally on a server, but distributed and replicated over all participating peers, avoiding the central single point of failure.

The peer-to-peer approach, however, has several challenges, such as:

• concurrent access to state,
• leaving and failing peers (churn),
• unbalanced load, and others.

The goal of this lab course is to design, implement and evaluate peer-to-peer mechanisms for multiplayer online game state management. We will use a simple game for the prototypical implementation and evaluation.

Some the relevant issues are:

• agreement
• backup and failover
• load balancing
• scalability

Prerequisites

• Programming in Java or C++
• Creativity
• Willingness to work in a team

Goals

• Understanding the concept of peer-to-peer computing
• Implementing and testing large-scale network applications
• Successfully work in a team

Language

The lab will be held in English. All students' presentations and texts can either be in English or German (English preferred).